Three or four people said the yes to a shoot on Sunday and there were several more maybes. It's supposed to be mild but with a chance of rain. Unless it is pouring, we'll go ahead with the shoot.

If you haven't been out to a shoot yet and don't have a rifle, come out anyway and borrow a gun. For those of you with a foster fitting on your PCP gun, I'll have my HPA tank there for refills. We will start setting up at 9:00, do some sighting in and try to start the match by 10:00. Setup will take a bit longer this time as we have lanes in the woods, trees, and across gullies to set up. Please read the safety rules at the bottom of this email.

We will have 10 lanes (three targets in each) with a total of 60 shots and we will have a standing and a kneeling lane. It would be handy if a couple of people could bring cordless drills and #2 bits to help mount so of the tree targets.If you're bringing targets, please have them freshly painted (faceplates and KZs should be contrasting colours).

We had Hunter Division as an option last time and it seemed to work out quite well. For those of you in Hunter Division we'll be using the CAFTA rules where hits on the faceplate score 1 point and a knock down scores 2 AND you cannot use the scope's parallax adjustments to help with range finding. If you have range markings on your parallax wheel/knob please cover them up with electrical or painters tape. Hunter Division is an especially good choice if you have a sub-500FPS gun. Remember, bipods are not allowed, only monopods. You can find the detailed CAFTA rules at: http://caftacentral.com//index.php/cafta/

In addition to your gun and pellets please bring along a pen, clipboard , stopwatch and something to sit on for the many seated shots. If you want to do sighting in please bring along a carton with targets attached. If you cut a couple of holes in the carton on one side near the bottom, you can run a string through the holes and then pull the target closer to you to check your elevation settings without needing a cease fire for everyone. We have a trick for how to turn the plastic carboard election signs into free standing paper target holders - if you have one, bring it along and we'll share the secret.

There will be a couple of airguns that people can borrow, and a growing number of fancy FT rifles for people to check out. Just let me know if you need to borrow a gun in advance.

Roland of http://nboairguns.ca/ wanted to share some good news - he's now also carrying Air Force airguns and several brands of match pellets. He also has a good price on Gamo targets.

I had dragged my wife out on the balmy, sunny Saturday afternoon to help set up targets in trees, so we had a decent head start but it still took almost 90 minutes to set up the rest of the targets - proving the corollary to "many hands make light work" - it would have gone much faster if there had been more than four of us.

Once again the gods smiled on our FT efforts. We had a few minutes of mist, negligible wind and the rain only started as we were putting targets away. Some idiot forgot a tote bag full of strings, so we only set up seven lanes of 3 targets. Of course, John grabbed all of the targets with reducers, so while most targets were relatively close about half had reducers. Overall, the difficulty level was pretty easy with a Troyer score of 20.5.

Brian's upside down bird was roosting in his usual tree, but up about 14'. (Brian was busy shopping at Rhino Targets in Florida while we were shooting this match - so look forward to some new critters in 2014) I made that part of a freestyle lane to maximize the angle and discovered with my first miss of the match that you really do have to treat extreme angle shots as if they are closer! I aimed at the top of the 1" KZ on the second shot and that did the trick.

WFTF
Dave 40/42
John 22/42

Hunter Piston
Duncan 50/84 - Jr
Steve 44/84 - sub-500

Anyone who has been dissuaded from attending a shoot this year because of a crappy forecast, missed out on good shooting. Many of our match dates had crappy weather forecasts, but we never actually got rained on during a match. If you look at the UK, where FT is a year-round sport, you can see that our season could be longer - just wear the right clothes and you'll be fine. Having said that, this was almost certainly the last event of 2013.

He's going to knock down that damn bird even if he has to climb a ladder to do it!